In a poem in Robert Glück’s Reader, dedicated to the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai, the speaker describes “Ed sucking me at the baths, pounding my heart once with his fists,” sending the speaker fainting, then imagining himself floating above his body to see Ed sucking his knotted 15-foot cock. “Now I am totally alienated from my body,” the speaker says to himself, “This might be a good time to stop and think.”
The joke is that few writers have milked the possibilities of embodied thinking like Glück; he’s plundered formal techniques from lyric poetry, verse drama, critical theory, fable, epistolary writing, and visual media, setting down his and his friends’ lives in the thick of it. Glück’s work captures moments of physical intensity—the throes of orgasm, horny yearning, betrayal, grief—with drama, titillation, and style, while also making an argument for its position of epistemic advantage for denuding reality.
About Ed, Glück’s newest book about his relationship with Ed and Ed’s AIDS-related death, flagrantly violates many of the expectations for an AIDS memoir. Instead of serving a dramatic arc, Glück cuts back and forth through time to blur our narrative associations. We gather that Bob met Ed on a streetcar stop in 1970, both newly out and in San Francisco, coming into their artistic careers and sexuality. They date for the next eight years, as Bob dotes and Ed cruises; they break up (“our marriage was so open it no longer included me”) but stay friends; Ed is diagnosed HIV-positive in 1987; Bob visits and helps Ed, and collaborates on material for the book; Ed dies in 1994. The book’s dramatic aorist defaults to the present tense before the depiction of Ed’s death, and the past thereafter; death cleaves time, distorting cause and effect.
The narrative is also interjected with episodes of thematic, if not immediately expository, relevance. The book begins with “Everyman,” a section that briefly depicts the illness and death of a neighbor, Mac, who is straight, and meddlesome if well-intentioned; the side-plot of Mac’s mourning acts as a rehearsal of sorts for Ed’s later in the book. In a book launch hosted in NYC, Glück elaborated on this choice: “Ed and Mac were both loyal to reality, even when they were not included.” In the ars poetica that ends the section, Bob contrasts “Ed’s solitude” with “Mac’s fact,” as romance and reality conjoin to invoke a domestic muse. The juxtaposition poses questions: How does a community of next-door neighbors differ from a community rooted in queer identity? How does one arrive at a true representation, or an ethical response to grief? Disjunctions like these across time and perspective reflect the primacy of capturing the book’s discursive quest towards grief over biographical continuity.
The intensity of grief is embarrassing in its scale, always too big or too small. Glück’s work is often a comedy of manners, and what event has greater demands on manners than the ceremony of death? In Jack the Modernist, Bob gets a call from Phyllis, a fellow writing workshop participant, about the unexpected death of her son Pete—whose name Bob doesn’t even recall—and the long, convulsive sob Bob bursts into surprises himself: “I wondered who all those tears were for. My question wasn’t so much a question as a symptom of an ironic emotional structure with its cruelty of design.” Grief’s irony lies in its indifference to valence and obligation: after Ed dies, Bob feels “a weird euphoria…the perilous nights connected me to the grief of other catastrophes—rejection in love, say, or when The Figures rejected a manuscript… I was weary after I slept, hungry after I ate…—the present could not take shape.” Grief is intolerable when it cannot enliven activity or appetite, but feels sadistic when it does. The narration of About Ed is suspended in this reflexive state, ruminating on the exteriorization of loss. The physical effects of loss bring this into sharper relief. Months after the death, Bob describes eating Mac’s frozen almondine—“Mac’s monument, a pure, solitary burial”—like Karen’s last ziti in The Sopranos with less catharsis: “In my dinner his blue eyes opened. I was not anguished. Perhaps I ate with a greater awareness of the moment.”
“Ed lived the era, was committed to it,” writes Glück, “I only halfway.” The book, two decades in the making and published in the fifth decade of the AIDS crisis, is conscious of its belatedness and, among this century’s echoes of New Narrative, hardly alone. Rob Halpern’s “Touching Voids In Sense” circles the hole in which he injects medicine into an HIV-positive lover as treatment for sarcoidosis, rendered simultaneously erotic and abject, in a discourse that ricochets between Guantanamo detainees, disability justice, and Mike Kelley’s Dust Balls. Eric Sneathen, in “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” recasts the figure of Gaetan Dugas, inaccurately vilified in And The Band Played On as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic, as a tragic hero—implicitly drawing a comparison in the epigraph to Odysseus, “a complicated man.” These examples explicitly confront the reader by dangling eroto-lyric pleasure before a compromised subject, proposing the inversion of a dominant system of values.
Distinct from these endeavors, Glück does not provoke or mythologize; the book is remarkable in how doggedly it attends to emotional ambivalence against the backdrop of death. Ed and Bob share plenty of scenes of riotous sexual discovery, sex both hot and hilarious, but Bob dedicates much of his attention to the complications in their romance: feeling cheated by giving away much of his time to support Ed’s career; annoyance with his own ambivalence to Ed’s promiscuity; fearing that his expression will betray him as he confronts Ed’s physical deterioration. It would be easy to imagine a book organized more explicitly around passion, injury, and revelation, and frustrating for some to sit with one where Bob answers an incredulous Ed asking if Bob truly loved him: “I was not sure I did. I’m reporting a conversation in a novel in which the whole truth is delivered. Instead, our feelings were hidden in subordinate clauses, passed over in an instant, pieced together later.”
Scattered across Glück’s earlier work are glimpses of other possible takes on About Ed, satires of campy premise transfigured by a sentimental or critical pitch. Count the Purple Men in Denny Smith, purple dye having spread throughout their bodies from a scientific experiment to measure the spread of parasites, a fable that would be silly if not for the lengths to which Glück takes the metaphor. Perhaps “Violence,” a story that bookends Elements, which starts with Ed narrowly escaping a gay-bashing on a bus and ends with him heroically interrupting a violent assault with mace, which Glück offers (winkingly, with abrupt tidiness) as a token of hope. Camp and satire there had the urgent task of liberating the Person with AIDS from the lurid dominant representation à la Nicholas Nixon of ravaged bodies resigned to death, by depicting them as social beings who fuck, care for each other, and fight back. In “Caricature,” a 1983 talk, Glück recalls reading such stories to queer audiences and being told after that he had “got it right,” suggesting that it brought forth a collectivity which “gives the writer access to history.”
It’s not that About Ed relinquishes its grasp on this communal consciousness, as Glück lays images of erotic intensity beside the detritus of community and crisis—bathhouses, picket lines, reading groups, coterie poetics, AIDS panic and confusion, workplaces—but that the intervening decades have freed for Gluck to explore a more enduring, abstract question: what can we make of death? Unlike those examples, which conclude with presenting a heroism (however provisionary, comic, or subversive) borne of political defiance, community romance, domestic intimacy, or erotic apotheosis, About Ed contends that grief has no essence—“An emptiness I can’t fill”—and is instead an accumulation of contradictions—“image replaces image”—which together form a dreamlike image of totality.
It’s fitting that About Ed ends with the extended section “Inside,” which compiles fifty-odd pages of Ed’s dream journals. The present tense resumes, presenting scenes in Ed’s perspective, in reverse chronological order with an anaphoric refrain of “Before that,” as a succession of lovers, parents, and friends collide in episodes of madcap sexual violence, bending gender (“loose chartreuse super-mini bikini strings circle my waist. My cock spills out, a secret I promise not to keep”). The displacement of voice provides new documentary avenues towards social totality, for instance to interrogate the floating signifier of race, sometimes a blind spot in New Narrative. Writes Bob:
Violence, terror, paranoia, and sex don’t surprise me, because that was Ed... But I didn’t know that he hosted a vibrant multiethnic community in his sleep. His friends and lovers were mostly white. That disparity is a blind spot in our relationship. How can I know Ed if I don’t know the kind of problem that race was for him? ... It seems [he] dealt with sexuality when we lived together, in the seventies, and with race in the eighties.
One of these 80s dreams seem to depict an internment, where Ed in a mass of Japanese prisoners “file in and hide behind a drape” before armed military guards. Whereas American experimental writing of Glück’s generation has a tendency to use Asianness as a red herring—for instance, the figure of China in Bob Perelman’s “China” and Steve Benson’s “Views on Communist China” acts as an organizing principle of the texts insofar through their unexpected distance from the work—these images leave room for nodes of content to condensate from the dream-world.
About Ed lives in the edit, a mind making the world as it interrogates itself, in a tiger’s leap into the past.